Is Hollow Knight: Silksong too cheap? A lot of people would say yes, but a lot more are just happy to have a shockingly affordable anything here in the year 2025. But the discourse around the game's price point and what, if any, precedent it sets for the indie space has been colorful.
The solo developer at Basti Games, behind well-reviewed mushroom Metroidvania Lone Fungus and now at work on the sequel Melody of Spores, pondered the feasibility of a $20 price point for a Metroidvania that won't be nearly as big as Silksong. The game is still fresh, but achievements suggest Silksong could be 50% bigger than Hollow Knight, which was already a massive Metroidvania even before it got several chunky DLCs.
"As a dev making a smaller Metroidvania than Silksong, which I originally thought would be fairly priced at 20 USD... what should I price it now?" the dev wonders on Twitter.
"It'll be a 10-15+ hours game," they say of Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores, "but it was made by one person with limited dev time and funds, I can't afford to give it away for free."
An unignorable reason that Silksong is so cheap is that Team Cherry can set whatever price it wants, and I don't mean that in the 'a lot of people would pay $80 for GTA 6' kind of way, although Silksong does command a following and reputation that scared many, many developers into delaying early September launches.
What I mean is, Hollow Knight sold 15 million copies at a base price of $15, and with a core dev team I could count on one hand, napkin math says Team Cherry already has enough money to basically do and make whatever it wants until the sun burns out.
There's math and research to be done on what might actually bring in more money in the end – $20 with a theoretically bigger install base, or maybe $30 for more money from potentially fewer buyers – but none of it really matters when you've got Hollow Knight money.
But most people don't have Hollow Knight money. In a follow-up post, Basti Art writes: "I feel reassured that a lot of people understand that Silksong's price is Team Cherry being cool and giving their game away for a cheap price, because they can. It might not necessarily affect other games pricing in the same genre."
Another Metroidvania dev, Frogreign developer Arkanpixel, posed the exact same question. "What should we price it at now?" the studio asks, having once thought $20 would be "fairly priced" for a game that will be "around 10+ hours, made by a small indie team (also from Australia)."
Interestingly, the original Hollow Knight had the exact same effect. Earlier this year, I spoke to Haiku, the Robot developer Jordan Morris of Mister Morris Games. Haiku, the Robot was heavily inspired by Hollow Knight but it was a fair bit shorter, and Morris agonized over pricing it higher than Team Cherry's (again, bizarrely low) mark of $15. In the end, he went for $20.
"I felt like I took a bit of a risk, because I just felt Hollow Knight was so underpriced, like €15 or $15," Morris told me. "In fact, I bought it multiple times because I'm just like, take my money, please. I've got it on Xbox, Switch, and PC. So yeah, I felt like that's too cheap, and for the time that it released versus the time that I was releasing mine, obviously the economy had changed. And you have to keep in mind discounts, how you discount your game.
"So I took a little bit of a risk, what I felt like was a bit of a risk, and just bumped up the price a little bit. I also looked at other games that were releasing around that time, and they were kind of doing the same thing, so I felt a bit more confident in doing that, and obviously it seems to be okay."
Morris raises a key point: other games are coming out! Silksong's release doesn't suddenly make other Metroidvanias overpriced. A look at the current top sellers of the genre on Steam reveals plenty of great Metroidvanias that cost more than $20 at full price.
Just recently, we had Supraworld and Shinobi: Art of Vengeance at $29.99. 2024's Nine Sols is still a top contender at $29.99. Blasphemous is 50% off right now, but it's $29.99 normally. Afterimage is normally $24.99, though it's 80% off at the moment. I paid $24.99 for Ender Magnolia: Bloom of the Mist at the start of the year and I don't regret a cent of it, and a lot of other people feel the same. Heck, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is $39.99 and it was reviewed very well among critics and players.
People are clearly happy to pay more than what Silksong is charging for demonstrably shorter or arguably less polished games, and I don't think Silksong's explosive day-one turnout would have meaningfully dropped at $25 or even $30, which reinforces how low Team Cherry has cut here.
